ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by summarizing repair in conversation and then in storytelling and institutional talk. It discusses about four examples that can be understood as self-initiated self-repairs, three from Serbo-Croatian epic and one from Homer, all of which other scholars have already identified as an error, inconsistency, or accident that was corrected in the following lines of the epic performance. In everyday conversation, self-initiated self-repair occurs in three positions. This chapter asserts that the performance of oral traditions have a "special grammar" produced by scholars identified by the society as "poets" or "bards" occurs within such an institutional setting. It concludes that institutions in which monologic storytelling is the standard form of talk may reinforce the preference for self-correction by denying or at least minimizing the role recipients can play in the coproduction of the story-in-progress.
